P " Bill O'Reilly; the Fox News talk- show host, has devoted several shows to Soros, characterizing him as a "sleawid" and a "far-left radical bomb-thrower." In an interview on Fox, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, falsely accused Soros of wanting "to spend seventy-five million dollars" in the current campaign-almost quadrupling the true sum. Soros, who had long been considered emotionally aloo was only spurred on by such attacks. "I've never seen him so partisan," Robert Boorstin, an executive at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said. Originally; Soros had planned to keep quiet about his personal political agenda unril after the election. Late this summer, he jettisoned this strategy in favor of wag- ing his own media-grabbing political cam- paign. He hired a publicist for a twelve- city; three-million -dollar speaking tour. He sponsored a two-page ad containing a lengthy summary of his views in the Wall Street Journal, and set up a blog on which he promised to answer strangers' e-mails. Soros also asked his publisher, Public Affairs, to print an additional fifty thou- sand paperback copies of his recent book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy;" a polemic against what Soros saw as the Bush Administration's doomed efforts to force other nations into military and eco- nomic submission. Though the book at- tacked the President's actions, Soros's decision to go on tour was also a slap at Bush's opponent, John Kerry. In early October, Soros told me, "I feel that Kerry hasn't gone far enough about Iraq." What had the candidate failed to say? "We need to convince the people of Iraq that we're going to leave," Soros said. Hadn't Kerry said precisely that, during his first debate with Bush? ''Yes, well, he did, but we have to make clear under what conditions we'll leave, and what we'll leave behind. We have to put in place systems for allocating th il " e 0 revenues. & Soros has toured the country; he has transformed himself from a lordly patron of powerless political dissidents into a dissident himself He has not heard a word from the Kerry campaign about his efforts. "The professionals have told me not to get mad but to get even," he said. Some fellow-activists on the Democratic side, such as Wes Boyd, the founder of MoveOn.org, had cautioned him about becoming a distraction in the campaign. Privately; some Democratic officials were more scathing. One worried that the Party's top funder was getting "kooky;" and said, "He showd shut up!" Another suggested acidly; "Why doesn't he just run for President himself?" Soros, his crit- ics said, seemed about to become the Democratic Party's answer to the con- servative movement's largest bankroller-- the reclusive Richard Mellon Scaife. "I hope I am more open, and more public-spirited," Soros said of the Scaife comparison. "But I recognize that what I've done has raised eyebrows, not just among the right wing but with ordinary people, too." Soros's fervor has sparked some ridicule even within his own famil According to a family friend, George's brother, Paw, a global investor who lives in Connecticut, once joked of his sibling, "He was perfectly normal until he made his first hundred million." Richard Medley; a former partner at Soros's hedge fund, was more sympathetic. "It's much deeper for him, in terms of his personal life, than most people realize," he said, adding that Bush "poses a massive threat" to everything that Soros values. The President's resistance to contemplat- ing his own errors, for instance, was anath- ema to Soros, who regards self-criticism as the beginning of wisdom. "George is a creature of the Enlightenment," Medley said. "He believes in rationality; science, the discoverable truth, and in relentless hon- esty. He's not a fundamentalist about mar- kets or anything else. The problem for him is that Bush is kind of the first anti- Enlightenment President we've had." In our conversations, Soros argued that for eighteen months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration had man- aged to "suspend the critical process" and "suppress all dissent" by labelling any crit- icism unpatriotic. It's an argument that not every Bush critic accepts. "1 disagree with him," Michael Kazin, a progressive American historian at Georgetown Uni- versity, said. "In the days after 9/11, the overwhehning majority of Americans ob- viously backed, Bush's tough stand against terrorism and the invasion of Mghani- stan. He didn't need to 'silence' them. And a small but vocal minority-Noam Chomsky; Katha Pollitt, Tariq Ali-were quite capable of making their views known." Since 2003, Soros acknowledges, dissent has become more widespread, and Einstein did his greatest thinking while walking on the beach. ', \ t. "" I ': ! .,' '-:- \., . ' ..., ' 'ff . /111; ,;111\ f. r:i ;:. f t,{I . I l)flIl,: ".lIIt. 1 \ ' i '. " : \.<111S II ! , ' It t : 1 11':' . .;-.;: ., . It Jte I It ',I 1,,,. ..... .. .",,, ,.-. ., II :1 íì r. 4 to .0 " 'ç , ., ,. .> ;'1;. f. t) I\'; I r \ . t.. ". IJ H 1,:. '" ,.\ I i ì. ,i 4 t 4t'.\ "S II. , ,".'., ., :'.,':. . -.. , \ì , .., :'r;,;O:-( " .. -.}. ; .;t .:J .. , ? " COLO ",- "C #/V/ V E '\..,' Where will you do yours? .. SCHOOL OF . Continuing j\..:"'" Education COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Keep thinking www.ce.columbia.edu THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 18, 2004 181